They’ve come from the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. From the Ojibwe and Inupiaq. Smoke rises from bundles of sweetgrass, cedar, and sage as they tell their stories of surviving Indian boarding schools. For some, the recounting for this Indigenous oral history project is not new. They bring weathered black-and-white family photos to honor relatives lost. Others, until now, have never disclosed their still-raw childhood trauma.

Across the country, a group of traveling Indigenous oral historians are there to listen, and to record these vital first-person narratives for a comprehensive Indigenous oral history project. They are part of an ongoing collaboration between the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition and the U.S. Department of the Interior. The goal is to more fully document the systemic abuse endured by generations of Indigenous people under the government’s attempts at forced assimilation that began in the 1800s and lasted for over a century.

Ramona Klein, a 77-year-old from North Dakota shared a particularly harrowing memory with the historians for the Indigenous oral history project, tribal officials and spiritual leaders who gathered in Bismarck, North Dakota in June to support the survivors.

She remembered a “big, green bus.” It carried Klein and her five siblings away from their sobbing mother and the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians to the militaristic Fort Totten Indian Boarding School. When the children arrived in 1954, she said, they met a matron who meted out beatings with a wooden paddle that school staff called “the board of education.”

The first-of-its-kind Indigenous oral history project, underway since March, receives and archives these memories. Three historians and a team of an additional 10 to 12 people have so far visited Indigenous communities in Oklahoma, Alaska, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, and Michigan, and will continue their work through 2026.

Their holistic approach recognizes that painful narratives cannot be collected without caring for the people who experienced the trauma.

“Many times people feel a sense of lightness after sharing their story,” said Charlee Brissette, a Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians tribal member and oral history project team lead. “But everybody’s story is unique, and when it comes to talking about abuse, sometimes they don’t always feel light in that moment.”

Read the full article about this Indigenous oral history project by Nancy Marie Spears at The Imprint.